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371 days ago
My fears were very well realized last night when my train from Arnhem to Duisburg reached the destination late and the connecting train has already left. However the possbile connection problems had been already announced on the train itself and some hidden voice from train speakers had advised to contact the Information desk at Duisburg in case of any problems. It turns out that the advice given was excellent. I was very readily given a room to stay in a nearby hotel and a ticket for the morning. It turns out my connecting train was the last one out of the station. I really did not have to spend a very cold night on the station bench after well. I got my first taste of the 'well-organized' method of the Germans. Even though it was a train station hotel, the room was pretty good and there was a PC at the reception with free Internet which I used eagerly to update my facebok status. My train for Bremen was to leave at 7:47. The breakfast was supposed to start at 6:30 well in time for ...
371 days ago
Today was the last day of the workshop titled 'Sensing a Changing World' which I came to attend at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The Workshop had started on 19th Nov and my presentation was on the first day itself. I was presenting on Fieldservers and I hope I have generated some interest on these devices in this part of the world. There was a technical excursion today to Northern Netherlands where the Dutch are deploying a large scale and unique antenna array called LOFAR for radio astronomy. Their idea is to make it low-cost and easily deployable using small sized phased array antennas instead of the tradional large parabolic ones which were the norm. With the end of the workshop, I have left behind at Wageningen a small beautiful city with cobble-stoned streets and small brick houses with sloped tiled roofs. They remind of the small alleys in Bhaktapur and Patan back home. If there was a large temple at the town center instead of the church with a bell-tower, Wageningen ...
647 days ago
It has been quite a while since I have updated my blog. There are many things that I have missed out writing on. I would like to start from the most significant ones that I have not written about and the 9th APNG Camp in Xi'an certainly qualifies as one of them. I have been attending the APNG Camps for several years now and the event brings together people working on different aspects of the Internet from through out the Asia Pacific. This time too, as before I had received a fellowship to attend the camp which sponsored my airfare and the stay there at Xi'an. Besides being a great opportunity for me to learn different stuff and meet lots of people, the venue itself was of great significance for me. Xi'an, a place I have heard a lot about, read about in magazines and Wikipedia, and watched a lot of documentaries on, was a place I had always wanted to go to. The 9th Camp gave me an excellent opportunity to fulfill one of my dreams. The thing that I wanted to see the most in ...
702 days ago
Since my latest entry, I have been to Nepal twice, to the mountains, to setup a wireless network for collecting data from a glacier. That was pretty interesting. I went to China once for a conference and to Indonesia to setup more sensors. Then I have been to Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen in Thailand recently. I guess this is just an excerpts of longer entries to come. I would like to write about those trips, but I don't know when I am gonna do it. Maybe next year.
863 days ago
For quite some time I've been watching movies with downloaded subtitles, which are more readily available on the Internet than I had cared to know about. I had the need for subtitles when I got my hands on some good Latin American movies. Being not-so-proficient in Spanish, I set about looking for subtitles which were easy enough to find from the plethora of dedicated websites available. What I came across next was even more interesting.... a program called Vobsub. It is capable of opening subtitle files in real time as the movie is being played. All you have to do is name the subtitle file (usually .srt) with the same filename as your movie (usually .avi for me) and keep both in the same directory. When you play the movie in your own usual way (for me it's on WinAmp), the susbtitles appear on the movie in real time. Now that's something really amazing for me.... the movie and the subtitle files are separate. The subtitle files are in fact simple text files with timings written before ...
